Show HN: Getada: rustup-like installer for Ada's toolchain/package manager

ajdude | 194 points

As a current Rustup maintainer with a bit of Ada background I gotta say: nice work!

I do feel Ada as a language is way ahead of its time, but when I was learning it (a while before the first Alire release) I was also puzzled by dev environment setup. I guess the Rust experience has shown the importance of a friendly onboarding experience, so I’m very glad to see Ada is going this direction as well with Alire and now Getada :)

rami3l | 12 days ago

> Since one of the biggest complaints about Ada is getting the toolchain [6], I hope this can solve a lot of problems for newcomers to the language.

It might be just me, but Alire isn't great, I tried it multiple times, it's great for getting complicated dependencies e.g Utilada, but I go for GPRBuild as it just avoids all the fuss when programming across Linux/macOS.

I might try a hard switch at one point as I didn't use Alire 2.0.0 that much, so maybe it's better now.

adezxc | 13 days ago

This is amazing. devX matter a lot for adoption. I keep hearing about Ada a lot but the learning experience were difficult when I tried it.

didip | 13 days ago

> One of my goals with Ada is to have a one-liner copy-paste terminal command for people to install Ada so they can get to coding in just a few minutes. After extensive testing I feel like it's ready for general release[1].

I never had trouble with this? Apt-get install gnat or similar has always worked for me. I only played around with Ada though, never did anything serious with it. Installing from source wasn't too bad either. But, trying to install spark from source was a big mess back in the day. I don't know about now.

throwaway81523 | 13 days ago

I got my start programming through an avionics apprenticeship. My first project was porting an Ada project to C. Still hurts my heart to think about now that I'm experienced enough to appreciate a lot more of the implications.

apitman | 12 days ago

I'm a little confused - is this just a wrapper around https://alire.ada.dev/ ? That tool itself isn't very hard to install.

inamberclad | 13 days ago

Bringing Ada into the 21st century bit by bit.

ultra_nick | 13 days ago

How is this not called "Byron"?

trollian | 13 days ago

On a related note, here's a throwback for old-timers: https://adagide.martincarlisle.com/

fer | 13 days ago

Does this make it possible to use Ada and SDL2 on Linux?

xyproto | 13 days ago

This! Tooling ease of use matters!

A lot of interesting tech died off or never took off because the tooling was just too cumbersome to setup and use.

ithkuil | 13 days ago

I don't know if it's the algorithm but for the past few months i've been seeing bits and pieces in random places about ada. Is there a reason the language is seeing more traction lately? I would assume the whole White House "approved" languages had something to do with it

glass-z13 | 13 days ago

[flagged]

jjgreen | 13 days ago

Just use Nix

max-privatevoid | 13 days ago